The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(56)
“You ever going to tell me where you really were that day?” Falk said.
Luke dragged his gaze back at that.
“Mate, I have told you,” he said. “A thousand times. I was shooting those rabbits.”
“Yeah. All right.” Falk stopped himself rolling his eyes. That had always been the answer, ever since he’d first asked several years earlier. It had never rung completely true. Luke rarely went shooting alone. And Falk could still remember Luke’s face at his bedroom window all those years ago. His memory of the night was colored by fear and relief, that was true, but the story had always felt plucked from the air. Luke was watching him closely.
“Maybe I should be asking you where you were,” Luke said, his voice artificially light. “If we’re going down that road again.”
Falk stared at him. “You know where I was. Fishing.”
“At the river.”
“Upstream, thanks.”
“But alone.”
Falk didn’t answer.
“So I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” Luke said, and he took a sip, his eyes never leaving Falk’s. “Luckily, your word is good as gold for me, mate. But seems it’d be better all round if you and I stuck to shooting rabbits together, don’t you reckon?”
The two men watched each other as the noise of the bar rose and fell around them. Falk considered his options. Then he sipped his beer and shut his mouth.
Eventually, they made their obligatory excuses about trains to catch and early starts. As they shook hands for what would prove to be the last time, Falk found himself struggling to remember, once again, why they were still friends.
Falk got into bed and turned off the light. He lay still for a long time. The huntsman had reappeared during the evening, and its shadowy figure now crouched above the bathroom door. The night was dead silent outside. Falk knew he needed to get some sleep, but fragments of recent and long-gone conversations jostled for his attention. Traces of caffeine zipping through his system helped prop his eyes open.
He rolled over and switched on the bedside light. The library books he’d taken from Barb earlier that day were lying under his hat on a chair. He’d drop them through the returns chute tomorrow. He picked up the first one. A practical guide to growing an eco-friendly succulent garden. He yawned just reading the title. That would almost certainly do the trick, but he simply couldn’t face it. The other was a battered paperback crime novel. A woman, an unknown figure lurking in the shadows, a body count. Standard stuff. Not quite to his taste, but he wouldn’t be in the job he was in if he didn’t enjoy a good mystery. He lay back against the pillow and started to read.
It was an obvious story line, nothing special, and Falk was about thirty pages in before his eyes started to feel heavy. He decided to put the book down at the end of the chapter, and as he turned a page, a thin slip of paper fluttered out and landed on his face.
He plucked it off and squinted at it. It was a printed library receipt showing that the novel had been lent to Karen Hadler on Monday, February 19. Four days before she’d died, Falk thought. She’d used the receipt to mark her place, and the realization that this mediocre thriller could have been the last thing she’d read in her life made him feel deeply depressed. Falk had started to crumple the receipt before he noticed the pen markings on the back.
Curious, he smoothed out the slip of paper and flipped it over. He was expecting a shopping list. Instead, he felt his heart start to thud. He pressed the creases out more carefully now and thrust it under the bedside light to better illuminate Karen’s looping cursive script.
At some point in the four days between when Karen Hadler borrowed the book from the library and when she was shot dead on her doorstep, she had scrawled two lines on the back of the receipt. The first was a single word, slightly messy, written in a hasty hand and underlined three times.
Grant??
Falk tried to focus, but his gaze was dragged down to a ten-digit phone number written underneath. He stared at the number until his eyes watered and the digits swarmed and blurred. The blood pounded through his skull with a throbbing, deafening roar. He blinked hard, then again, but the numbers remained resolutely in the same order.
Falk didn’t waste a single moment wondering who the phone number belonged to. He didn’t need to. He knew it well. It was his own.
23
They found Grant Dow the next morning on all fours under a woman’s sink. He had a wrench in hand and his fleshy crack on display.
“Oi, will he be back to fix that leak?” the woman asked as Dow was dragged to his feet.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Raco said.
The woman’s children watched in wide-eyed glee as Dow was led out to the marked police car. Their expressions mirrored Raco’s just a few hours earlier when Falk had produced the receipt. Raco had paced around the station, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the adrenaline pumping.
“Your number?” he said over and over again. “Why did Karen Hadler want to talk to you? About Grant?”
Falk, who had been awake most of the night asking himself the very same thing, could only shake his head.
“I don’t know. If she tried, she definitely didn’t leave a message. I’ve gone through my missed calls history. No match for Karen’s home, work, or cell number. And I know I never spoke to her. Not just recently. Ever. Not once in her whole life.”